The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  “Aside from that, the stimulus capable of arousing an emotion is connected with the emotion insofar as what stimulates, for instance, a starving person is a matter of indifference to a person who has been insulted, and vice versa.”

  “Similar complications result when the subsequent process is to be described seriatim. Thus even the question of when an emotion is present cannot be answered, although according to the basic view by which it is to be effected and then produce an effect itself, it must be assumed that there is such a point in time. But the arousing stimulus does not actually strike an existing state, like the ball in the mechanical contraption that sets off a sequence of consequences like falling dominoes, but continues in time, calling forth a fresh supply of inner forces that both work according to its sense and vary its effect. And just as little does the emotion, once present, dissipate immediately in its effects, nor does it itself remain the same even for an instant, resting, as it were, in the middle between the processes it assimilates and transmits; it is connected with a constant changing in everything to which it has connection internally and externally, and also receives reactions from both directions.

  “It is a characteristic endeavor of the emotions to actively, often passionately, vary the stimuli to which they owe their origin, and to eliminate or abet them; and the major directions of life are those toward the outside and from the outside. That is why anger already contains the counterattack, desire the approach, and fear the transition to flight, to paralysis, or something between both in the scream. But an emotion also receives more than a little of its particularity and content through the retroactive effect of this active behavior; the well-known statement of an American psychologist that we do not weep because we are sad, but are sad because we weep’ might be an exaggeration, yet it is certain that we don’t just act the way we feel, but we also soon learn to feel the way we act, for whatever reasons.

  “A familiar example of this back-and-forth pathway is a pair of dogs who begin to romp playfully but end up in a bloody fight; a similar phenomenon can be observed in children and simple people. And is not, ultimately, the entire lovely theatricality of life such an example writ large, with its half-momentous, half-empty gestures of honor and being honored, of menacing, civility, strictness, and everything else: all gestures of wanting-to-represent-something and of the representation that sets judgment aside and influences the emotions directly. Even the military ‘drill* is part of this, based as it is on the effect that a behavior imposed for a long time finally produces the emotions from which it was supposed to have sprung.”

  “More important than this reacting to an action, in this and other examples, is that an experience changes its meaning if its course happens to veer from the sphere of the particular forces that steered it at the beginning into the sphere of other mental connections. For what is going on internally is similar to what is happening externally. The emotion pushes inside; it ‘grabs hold of the whole person’ as colloquial language not inappropriately has it; it suppresses what doesn’t suit it and supports whatever can offer it nourishment. In a psychiatric textbook, I came across strange names for this: ‘switching energy’ and ‘switching work’ But in this process the emotion also stimulates the inner sphere to turn toward it. The inner readiness not already expended in the first instant gradually pushes toward the emotion; and the emotion will be completely taken over from within as soon as it gets hold of the stronger energies in ideas, memories, or principles, or in other stored-up energy, and these will change it in such a way that it becomes hard to decide whether one should speak of a moving or of a being moved.

  “But if, through such processes, an emotion has reached its high point, the same processes must weaken and dilute it again as well. For emotions and experiences will then crisscross the region of this climax, but no longer subordinate themselves to it completely; indeed, they will finally displace it. This countercurrent of satiety and erosion really begins when the emotion first arises; the fact that the emotion spreads indicates not only an expansion of its power but, at the same time, a relaxation of the needs from which it arose or of which it makes use.

  “This can also be observed in relation to the action; for emotion not only intensifies in the action, but also relaxes in it; and its satiety, if it is not disturbed by another emotion, can proceed to the point of excess, that is to say, to the point where a new emotion occurs.”

  “One thing deserves special mention. So long as an emotion subjugates the internal aspect, it comes in contact with activities that contribute to experiencing and understanding the external world; and thus the emotion will be able to partly pattern the world as we understand it according to its own pattern and sense, in order to be reinforced within itself through the reactive aspect. Examples of this are well known: A violent feeling blinds one toward something that uninvolved observers perceive and causes one to see things others don’t. For the melancholy person, everything is gloomy; he punishes with disregard anything that might cheer him up; the cheerful person sees the world in bright colors and is not capable of perceiving anything that might disturb this. The lover meets the most evil natures with trusting confidence, and the suspicious person not only finds his mistrust confirmed on every side, but these confirmations also seek him

  1262 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES

  out to plague him. In this way every emotion, if it attains a certain strength and duration, creates its own world, a selective and personal world, and this plays no small role in human relations! Here, too, is where our notorious inconsistency and our changeable opinions belong.”

  Here Ulrich had drawn a line and briefly reverted to the question of whether an emotion was a state or a process. The questions peculiarity now clearly emerged as illusory. What followed took up, in summary and continuing fashion, where the previous description had left off:

  “Proceeding from the customary idea that emotion is a state that emanates from a cause and produces consequences, I was led in my exposition to a description that doubtless does represent a process if the result is observed over a fairly long stretch. But if I then proceed from the total impression of a process and try to grasp this idea, I see just as clearly that the sequence between neighboring elements, the one-after-another that is an essential part of a process, is everywhere missing. Indeed, every indication of a sequence in a particular direction is missing. On the contrary, it points to a mutual dependence and presupposition between the individual steps, and even to the image of effects that appear to precede their causes. Nor do any temporal relationships appear anywhere in the description, and all this points, for a variety of reasons, to emotion being a state.

  “So strictly speaking I can merely say of an emotion that it seems to be a state as much as it is a process, or that it appears to be neither a state nor a process; one statement can be justified as easily as the other.

  “But even that depends, as can easily be shown, at least as much on the manner of description as on what is described. For it is not a particular idiosyncrasy of mental activity, let alone that of emotion, but occurs also in other areas in describing nature; for instance, everywhere where there is talk of a system and its elements, or of a whole and its parts, that in one person’s view can appear as a state while another person sees it as a process. Even the duration of a process is associated for us with the concept of a state. I could probably not say that the logic of this double idea-formation is clear, but apparently it has more to do with the distinction between states and processes belonging to the way thinking expresses itself in language than it does with the scientific picture presented by facts, a picture that states and processes might improve but might also, perhaps, allow to disappear behind something else.”

  “The German language says: Anger is in me, and it says: I am in anger [Ich bin in Zorn]. It says: I am angry, I feel angry [Ich fühle mich zornig]. It says: I am in love [Ich bin verliebt], and I have fallen in love [Ich habe mich verliebt]. The names the language has given to the emoti
ons probably point back frequently, in its history, to language’s having been affected by the impression of actions and through dangerous or obvious attitudes toward actions; nevertheless, language talks of an emotion as, in one case, a state embracing various processes, in another as of a process consisting of a series of states. As the examples show, it also includes quite directly in its forms of expression, various though these may be, the idea-formations of the individual and of external and internal, and in all this the language behaves as capriciously and unpredictably as if it had always intended to substantiate the disorder of German emotions.

  “This heterogeneity of the linguistic picture of our emotions, which arose from impressive but incomplete experiences, is still reflected today in the idea-formation of science, especially when these ideas are taken more in breadth than in depth. There are psychological theories in which the ‘I’ appears as the most certain element, present in every movement of the mind, but especially in the emotion of what is capable of being experienced, and there are other theories that completely ignore the ‘I’ and regard only the relationships between expressions as capable of being experienced, describing them as if they were phenomena in a force field, whose origin is left out of account. There are also ego psychologies and psychologies without the ego. But other distinctions, too, are occasionally formulated: thus emotion may appear in one place as a process that runs through the relation of an ‘I’ to the external world, in another as a special case and state of connectedness, and so forth: distinctions that, given a more conceptual orientation of the thirst for knowledge, easily press to the fore so long as the truth is not clear.

  “Much is here still left to opinion, even if one takes the greatest care to distinguish opinion from the facts. It seems clear to us that an emotion takes shape not just anywhere in the world but within a living being, and that it is ‘I’ who feels, or feels stimulation within itself. Something is clearly going on within me when I feel, and I am also changing my state. Also, though the emotion brings about a more intense relation to the external world than does a sense perception, it seems to me to be more Inward’ than a sense perception. That is one group of impressions. On the other hand, a stand taken by the entire person is associated with the emotion as well, and that is another group. I know about emotion, in distinction to sense perception, that it concerns ‘all of me’ more than sense perception does. Also, it is only by means of an individual person that an emotion brings something about externally, whether it is because the person acts or because he begins to see the world differently. Indeed, it cannot even be maintained that an emotion is an internal change in a person without the addition that it causes changes in his relation to the external world.”

  “So does the being and becoming of an emotion take place ‘in’ us, or to us, or by means of us? This leads me back to my own description. And if I may give credence to its disinterestedness, the relationships it discreetly illuminates once again reinforce the same thing: My emotion arises inside me and outside me; it changes from the inside and the outside; it changes the world directly from inside and indirectly, that is through my behavior, from outside; and it is therefore, even if this contradicts our prejudice, simultaneously inside and outside, or at least so entangled with both that the question as to what in an emotion is internal and what external, and what in it is ‘I’ and what the world, becomes almost meaningless.

  “This must somehow furnish the basic facts, and can do so expeditiously, for, expressed in rather measured words, it merely states that in every act of feeling a double direction is experienced that imparts to it the nature of a transitory phenomenon: inward, or back to the individual, and outward, or toward the object with which it is concerned. What, on the other hand, inward and outward are, and even more what it means to belong to the ‘I’ or the world, in other words what stands at the end of both directions and would therefore be necessary to permit us to understand their presence completely: this is of course not to be clearly grasped in the first experience of it, and its origin is no clearer than anything else one experiences without knowing how. It is only through continuing experience and investigation that a genuine concept for this can be developed.

  “That is why a psychology that considers it important that it be a real science of experience will treat these concepts and proceed no differently from the way such a science does with the concepts of state and process; and the closely related ideas of the individual person, the mind, and the ‘I’ but also complete ideas of inward and outward, will appear in it as something to be explained, and not as something by whose aid one immediately explains something else…

  “The everyday wisdom of psychology agrees with this remarkably well, for we usually assume in advance, without thinking about it much, that a person who shows himself in a way that corresponds to a specific emotion really feels that way. So it not seldom happens, perhaps it even happens quite often, that an external behavior, together with the emotions it embraces, will be comprehended directly as being all of a piece, and with great certainty.

  “We first experience directly, as a whole, whether the attitude of a being approaching us is friendly or hostile, and the consideration whether this impression is correct comes, at best, afterward. What approaches us in the first impression is not something that might perhaps prove to be awful; what we feel is the awfulness itself, even if an instant later the impression should turn out to be mistaken. And if we succeed in reconstituting the first impression, this apparent reversal permits us to also discern a rational sequence of experiences, such as that something is beautiful and charming, or shameful or nauseating.

  “This has even been preserved in a double usage of language we meet with every day, when we say that we consider something awful, delightful, or the like, emphasizing thereby that the emotions depend on the person, just as much as we say that something is awful, delightful, and the like, emphasizing that the origin of our emotions is rooted as a quality in objects and events. This doubleness or even amphibian ambiguity of the emotions supports the idea that they are to be observed not only within us, but also in the external world.”

  With these last observations Ulrich had already arrived at the third answer to the question of how the concept of emotion is to be determined; or, more reservedly, at the opinion on this question that prevails today.

  55

  FEELING AND BEHAVIOR. THE PRECARIOUSNESS OF EMOTION

  “The school of theoretical psychology most successful at the moment treats emotions and the actions associated with emotions as an indissoluble entity. What we feel when we act is for this psychology one aspect, and how we act with feeling the other aspect, of one and the same process. Contemporary psychology investigates both as a unit. For theories in this category, emotion is—in their terms—an internal and external behavior, event, and action; and because this bringing together of emotion and behavior has proved itself quite well, the question of how the two sides are to be ultimately separated again and distinguished from each other has become for the time being almost secondary. That is why instead of a single answer there is a whole bundle of answers, and this bundle is rather untidy.”

  “We are sometimes told that emotion is simply identical with the internal and external events, but we are usually merely told that these events are to be considered equivalent to the emotion. Sometimes emotion is called, rather vaguely, ‘the total process,’ sometimes merely internal action, behavior, course, or event. Sometimes it also seems that two concepts of emotion are being used side by side: one in which emotion would be in a broader sense the ‘whole’ the other in which it would be, in a narrower sense, a partial experience that in some rather hazy way stamps its name, indeed its nature, on the whole. And sometimes people seem to follow the conjecture that one and the same thing, which presents itself to observation as a complex process, becomes an emotion when it is experienced; in other words, the emotion would then be the experience, the result, and, so to speak, what the process yields in consciousne
ss.

  “The origin of these contradictions is no doubt always the same. For every such description of an emotion exhibits components, preponderantly in the plural, that are obviously not emotions, because they are actually known and equally respected as sensation, comprehension, idea, will, or an external process, such as can be experienced at any time, and which also participate exactly as they are in the total experience. But in and above all this there is also just as clearly something that seems in and of itself to be emotion in the simplest and most unmistakable sense, and nothing else: neither acting, nor a process of thinking, nor anything else.

  “That’s why all these explanations can be summarized in two categories. They characterize the emotion either as an aspect,’ a component,’ or a ‘force’ of the total process, or else as the ‘becoming aware’ of this process, its ‘inner result,’ or something similar; expressions in which one can see clearly enough the embarrassment for want of better ones!”

  “The most peculiar idea in these theories is that at first they leave vague the relation of the emotion to everything it is not, but with which it is filled; but they make it appear quite probable that this connection is in any case, and however it might be thought of otherwise, so constituted that it admits of no discontinuous changes, and that everything changes, so to speak, in the same breath.

  “It can be thought of in terms of the example of melody. In melody the notes have their independent existence and can be recognized individually, and their propinquity, their simultaneity, their sequence, and whatever else can be heard are not abstract concepts but an overflowing sensory exposition. But although all these elements can be heard singly in spite of their connectedness, they can also be heard connectedly, for that is precisely what melody is; and if the melody is heard, it is not that there is something new in addition to the notes, intervals, and rhythms, but something with them. The melody is not a supplement but a second-order phenomenon, a special form of existence, under which the form of the individual existences can just barely be discerned; and this is also true of emotion in relation to ideas, movements, sensations, intentions, and mute forces that unite in it. And as sensitive as a melody is to any change in its ‘components’ so that it immediately takes on another form or is destroyed entirely, so can an emotion be sensitive to an action or an interfering idea.